The horrifying AI development means robots can now talk to animals – and maybe we can

PEOPLE are one step closer to talking to animals as new technologies allow robots with artificial intelligence to talk to different species.

Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia, recently revealed that this technology is being used to communicate with honey bees, dolphins and elephants and offered a warning regarding the development.

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“This raises a very serious ethical question, as the ability to converse with other species sounds intriguing and fascinating, but it can be used to create a deeper sense of kinship, or a sense of dominion and manipulative ability to control wild animals.” domesticate species that we as humans have never been able to control before,” Bakker said in an interview published with Vox.

She pointed out the use of artificial intelligence to communicate with honeybees in Germany.

“A research team in Germany coded honeybee signals into a robot that they sent into a beehive,” Bakker said.

“That robot can use the honeybees’ wagging dance communication to tell the honeybees to stop moving, and it’s able to tell those honeybees where to fly for a specific nectar source.”

“The next stage in this research is to implant it” robots in beehives, so that the beehives accept these robots as members of their community from birth.”

At the time, Bakker emphasized that people would have “an unprecedented degree of control” over those hives, in effect “domesticating” them.

“This creates the possibility of exploitative use of animals. And there’s a long history of the military use of animals, so that’s a path that I think is ringing a lot of alarm bells,” she said.

For Bakker, who further elaborates on the recent technology in her book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, these concerns shouldn’t stop scientists from communicating with animals.

“But the hope is that with this ethic in the future, we — you and me, ordinary people — will be much more able to tune in to the sounds of nature and understand what we’re hearing,” she said. said.

“And I think what that does creates a real sense of awe and wonder and also a sense of deep affinity. That’s where I hoped we’d use these technologies.”

In the Vox interview, Bakker noted that using AI in communicating with animals is very different from how humans have tried in the past.

For example, she pointed to teaching primates in human or sign language, calling it a “very human-centered view.”

Now the research and technology is focused on the behavior and patterns of different species.

Bakker explained that the process starts by recording sounds that animals and plants make to detect patterns and “associate them with behavior to try to determine whether complex information is being conveyed by the sounds.”

“What [these researchers] doing is not trying to learn those kinds of human language, but rather putting together, essentially, dictionaries of signals and then trying to understand what those signals mean within those species,” she told the outlet.

So far, Bakker said the research has found that elephants have different signals to honeybees — which they view as a threat — and humans.

Even further, elephants can also distinguish between non-threatening people and threatening people.

“It’s funny that humans as a species tend to believe that what we can’t perceive doesn’t exist,” Bakker said.

“So a lot of these sounds were literally right in front of our ears. But because of the tendency, especially in Western science, to prefer sight over sound, we just hadn’t listened to them.”